As one blogger puts it: Julie Moult is an idiot. And we're here to let her know.Stealer of images (from top fellow Beau Bo d'Or) and all-round Daily Mail Hackette, Julie needs a wee lesson in the art of Googlebombing...

Google gives about 330 for "julie moult" +idiot right now. Guess that will be many more soon.Update [14-sept-2008] 43.000 for "julie moult" +idiot right now.Update [14-dec-2008] about 2,440 for "julie moult" +idiot

zondag 24 augustus 2008

Since my last still standing PC is equipped with JMicron 363 SATA on board and SATA disks only, installing Windows is somewhat of a bitch since the last floppydrive left the house about 8 years ago.

XP is from the era that every machine still had a floppy drive so when you need to load an extra driver the only option you got is... supplying these drivers on a floppy.

Luckily there are more people who suffer from this handicapped feature and did something about it: nlite is the solution for XP. It enables one to easily make a slipstreamed XP image with added drivers [SATA comes to mind], Service Packs, patches, regional settings, XP key and much more.

Untill a week ago, I would rely on InfraRecorder [open source] to burn ISO's to CD's and DVD's but I noticed an issue with an ISO I had downloaded and tried to burn on a DVD: it was in CD format so the results where not what I expected. ImageBurn is much more advanced and able to convert CD format to DVD, on the fly. It does not get much easier then that.

So armed with a slipstreamed ISO, packed with SATA drivers, SP3 and then some, I booted the beast to be hit by various BSoD's... So that was my last attempt to have a pure window's machine.

Microsoft, it was good as long as it lasted but this is my final goodbye. I will still use your OS'es at times [for games & on dreaded corporate machines!] but I will not ever spend a cent on it again.

Vista might be lame to most, for me it is a bridge too far and something I am not even looking at.Photo by algo

vrijdag 15 augustus 2008

Since the latest DNS patch horror for those who _still_ use BIND over DJBDNS or OpenDNS, a lot of smart people who know a lot more about DNS then you & me together have been pointing to DNSsec as an even better cure.

DNSsec is a bitch to setup and use, even the guruus over at SANS are reluctantly and carefully touching the DNSsec waters. To actually benevit from the sec part of DNSsec, the end user would need to 'see' something like a nice big fat green thingy when connected to a DNSsec protected website, right?

Unfortunatly DNSsec is still not really widely deployed. There is no buildin firefox [or anyother browser for that matter] support.

Well for Firefox there is an extention for all your needs, to for DNSsec there is too. Called the DRILL extention. It would not install on my FF 3.0.1 since the DRILL exention ‘will not be installed because it does not provide secure updates’. Solution: go to the about page, create a new bolean called extensions.checkUpdateSecurity and set it to false. Try again & fail again: the extention does not support FF 3.x

For my MAC PowerBook A couple of months ago I bought a PCMCIA UMTS card with a KPN subscription for Mobile Internet. Costs a couple of euro but it provides me with Internet access when not being able to connect to a cable, for whatever reason.

I bought a MacBook a little later and since it does not have a PCMCIA slot, got myself a HuaWei E270 USB device to go with it. The HuaWei USB will automount, show the drivers that need to be installed and does so with all the correct settings preloaded: if one runs some sort of windows.

I do not.

Luckily KPN provides a dmg with the correct config from their website for us 'few' MAC users. Nice.

Unfortunatly my connection suffers from various problems:

connection speed sucks: 100 KB/s toprate up & down

HuaWeidrivers kernel panics OSX

syslog takes up to 80[!!!] % of the CPU when beeing flooded by the HuaWei driver

Of course the KPN helpdesk offers 'solutions' that do not cut ice:

Use another OS [riiight!]

Use another machine [Ok, give me one!]

Have the HuaWei driver installed by a service point [it is!]

Google assistance requiered. I took a random [1 in a million :P ] syslog line "RemovefromQueue: Enter, MaciSize" and found more people who are complaining their syslog was beeing filled up by the HuaWei driver messages, unstable connections & other jazz. In the HuaWei forums people are going rampant suggesting to go wired DSL because this seems not to be resolved although the user x00114004 [who's profile claims he works at HuaWei] says he has sent the information to the R&D department. Over at the Apple Support forums it is the same. In Australia too.

Most complaints are about the E220, but some mention the E226 and mine is the E270.

Luckily there is an updated version of the E270 driver available for OSX, unfortunatly it is wrapped in a .EXE, sigh...

dinsdag 12 augustus 2008

How is that, you give away a kick ass front-end, secure IMAP & POP, more storage space then anyone and a near perfect service and everyone is silently using ad-blockers to prevent you from making money and you accept that. But when there is ONE DAY of availability issues with that kick ass service, people go ape shit and you even apologize!

I would like to thank the gmail team for exceeding all my expectations, consistently.

dinsdag 5 augustus 2008

As an investigator, I can only agree: everything you say can and will be used against you. One of my most respected teachers on the subject taught me an other trick. It comes down to screaming 'I NEED HELP' and I will leave it to the reader to think up the context as in when the time has come to [ab-]use this.

Most people are not even aware that LYING is allowed in the process of interrogation...

MyTraceRoute is a kick ass network connection 'debug' implementation that sends a sequence of ICMP ECHO requests to each hop to determine the quality of the link to each machine. As it does this, it prints running statistics about each machine.

Simple, light & uses stuff we have been using for years, just a little better. The way I like it. It runs nicely on the iPhone, install it via Cydia, but for the love of cheese I can not compile it on my OSX Darwin MacBook.

About my job

gets paid to keep the bad stuff out and the good stuff flowing. Ever since he attended the 'Building Internet Firewalls' book presentation by Brent Chapman he's been doing the Internet Security dance. The signed copy is still part of his 5-book collection.
From the old 'keeping the bad stuff out', the mission has changed a lot. Now it's more and more keeping the good stuff go. Think the Jericho Forums, think identity management, think roaming.